Innocence Lost and Purpose Found
by invariablyravens
Summary: There are two fundamental truths to Eliot Spencer. One is that he cares about people. The other is that he's good in a fight.


Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Leverage.

 _Written for the September 2015 Character Appreciation Week on Tumblr_

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There are two fundamental truths to Eliot Spencer. One is that he cares about people. The other is that he's good in a fight. He's always understood himself pretty well, so he knew it. That paired with his down-home patriotic values and a belief that he should use his talents for God led him to the military. It seemed like the place to be no matter what his family thought about it. They warned him and didn't want him to go, but his idealism and adolescent energy won out. Eliot knew he could help a lot of people and he never was that interested in college anyway.

Basic training was easy. It was exhausting and he had to learn how to take orders, but that's a small sacrifice for a larger mission. He knew he could push himself further, so he signed up for special ops. Being young and fit, he worked his way up the chain quickly. With each new rank and assignment, he found another "more special," "more secret" ops team promising him more important work. He jumped at the chance to do anything he felt he was particularly suited for. He didn't see that not all of his commanders shared his beliefs. He dismissed the red flags that went up when they asked their teams to do more and more illegal things. What's a little bending of the law to save thousands of people?

Eliot believed in his very soul that they were doing great things. He loved the soldiers around him like brothers and the commanding officer he served under last and longest became a replacement for the father who refused to support him if he left – a fact that would haunt him in the disillusioned years to come. Then one day about two years before the end of his service everything changed.

He still won't talk about what happened that day. He knows it wasn't the worst thing he's ever done, but it was the first act of violence he couldn't justify and the feeling of his whole belief system crashing around him cuts deep. It was the first time he killed someone he knew was innocent. He was under orders. The mission relied on him doing his job right. It didn't occur to him until he tried to sleep that night that maybe his job wasn't the right thing to do. Maybe the mission wasn't helping people. Maybe his commanding officer wasn't the man he thought he was.

Eliot didn't sleep that night. He replayed the last few years over and over in his mind pointing out all of the times people he thought represented the good in the world took advantage of him. He felt like every bullet he ever shot into someone else came back and hit him in that moment. He was hurt, broken, ashamed. He finally understood what his father meant and the guilt choked him.

The next day he tentatively reached out to his closest friends. He downplayed his feelings a bit, but he told them what he was thinking and asked them what to do. Every one of them told him how much he meant to them, but the world just wasn't the way he imagined it. The only ones who hadn't gone through the same existential crisis sometime after joining were the ones who joined for the money or because they didn't know what other skills they had. His commanding officer, having seen hundreds of soldiers come to the same conclusion and not having any patience left, told him it didn't matter and he had to follow orders anyway because the military owned him until his contract was up.

The next two years were the hardest in his life. He went on mission after mission he knew he'd regret. He lost faith in God, man, and the concept of goodness itself. Over time, he labeled himself as a bad person because sometimes the way not to go insane in the face of evil is to embrace it. In the end, he grew numb to it all.

When his contract expired, Eliot knew he couldn't go home. It wasn't that he still blamed his family for not supporting him. He blamed himself for thinking he knew better at the time. He couldn't go back and show them proof that they were right. He didn't want them to see the person he'd become. He hoped that they'd keep picturing the good little southern boy that left.

He wasn't that boy anymore; he was a soldier. He accepted that role to get him through his contract and he didn't know how to let it go. Some of his war buddies found work as guns-for-hire and they hooked him up with some lucrative but clearly criminal jobs. His values were still the same and he hated every minute of it, but he was a bad guy now. What was one more mission? He'd jump at a chance for redemption if he believed there was one, but who was he kidding?

Years passed. Eliot did his job and did it well. He worked well on a team and he could appeal to questionable employers. He enjoyed the days, especially after working for Moreau, when his reputation alone was enough to scare his marks into giving up without a fight. He tried to pick retrieval missions so at least killing wasn't mandatory. The only person he ever grew attached to was Toby Heath whose culinary training kept him from losing himself completely.

One day he gets a call from Victor Dubenich. The job sounds like a simple in-and-out with a payout large enough to merit putting up with the weird team Dubenich put together. What he didn't expect was the double cross and the dramatic reverse-theft to follow. The honest man Nate Ford was surprisingly good at keeping complex schemes running smoothly and he seemed to have noble intentions even if he was a bit twisted. The whole team seemed oddly attracted to the idea of Nate's Robin-Hood-esque mission, so, when they pushed for another, Eliot figured it couldn't hurt to stick around. At worst, they would turn out like all of the other teams he'd worked for. They might very well provide the lesser of the available evils he could be paid for. At best, though he wouldn't quite let himself think it, they could be exactly what that good little southern boy was looking for in the military all those years ago.

It took him a long time to accept that he found the real thing. He kept waiting for the telltale signs that the team didn't share his values. He felt like he was finally able to live those values the way he wanted to as a boy and it reminded him all too much of the first time he felt that way. He wanted them to be genuine. He missed the days when everything was simple and the violence had meaning. He missed the bond that came from shared hardship. He missed implicitly trusting people.

Eliot grew attached to his team despite himself. Caring about people was the one thing he could never control and he couldn't really fault himself for it. He protected them physically and mentally. He confronted them when they had problems because every soldier knows that anyone's problems are everyone's problems when you're fighting to survive. Over time, he began to realize how little pretense they had. Being the good guys was obviously new to most of them, but they really did want to be. They cared about people too. Only then did he allow himself to hope that they might lead him to his redemption. Even when he was the bad guy, he was at an odd kind of peace with himself. What he was missing was meaning that made life more than just survival. Nate's strange band of criminal misfits gave him that.


End file.
